Scality RING Powers Iron Mountain’s 500PB IronCloud 2.0 with Scality

Jeff Mach’s presentation at Cloud Field Day 23 focused on Iron Mountain’s implementation of Scality RING for its Iron Cloud 2.0 offering. Iron Mountain, a long-standing provider of storage solutions, transitioned to cloud storage to meet the growing demand for secure data storage. The presentation highlighted the evolution of Iron Cloud, from its early iterations to the current Iron Cloud 2.0, which is built upon Scality RING to provide a highly scalable, secure, and compliant S3 object storage solution. This deployment leverages two clusters, each with a raw capacity of over a quarter of an exabyte, to deliver ultra-secure, long-term archive solutions, providing enterprise and government clients with confidence and compliance.

The core of the Iron Cloud 2.0 infrastructure utilizes Scality RING to offer features such as object locking for compliance, bi-directional replication, and high availability. This architecture is designed to provide robust, 24/7 availability with no downtime. The primary use case for Iron Cloud is backups, but it also supports general-purpose S3 storage, allowing customers to write and retrieve data. The presentation highlighted the cost-effectiveness of the solution, emphasizing consumption-based pricing without egress charges, offering savings compared to alternative public cloud offerings. Iron Mountain’s architecture consists of an F5 load balancer, S3 connectors, and high-density supermicro servers with 90 drives each to store the massive volumes of data that are replicated to tape for cold storage.

The presentation discussed how Scality adapted to meet Iron Mountain’s specific needs. Two key customizations were the support for LUKS disk encryption, which enables encryption on standard drives without requiring self-encrypting drives. The second was the support of replication to tape with the Atempo software. They have also deployed bi-directional replication across the two clusters for added data protection. Iron Mountain has achieved impressive performance metrics since its launch, including a current ingestion rate of 500 terabytes per week, with 119 billion objects stored, while only utilizing 6% of the cluster’s capacity. The overall customer feedback has been extremely positive, leading to an ongoing migration from Iron Cloud 1 to Iron Cloud 2, showcasing the successful integration of Scality RING.